The present invention relates generally to item dispensing, and in particular to systems and methods for managing or controlling user access to a dispensing unit, such as a dispensing unit in a medical or other healthcare facility.
Medical facilities, such as hospitals, use dispensing stations or units to facilitate the delivery of supplies or other items. Such dispensing units may be placed near patients and are designed to hold various supplies and pharmaceuticals needed by those patients. The dispensing units have the ability to control access and maintain records on the number and types of items that are dispensed. For example, a dispensing unit may include a cabinet with a plurality of retractable drawers. Each drawer can be divided into bins, so that more than one type of item may be held within each drawer in order to facilitate the delivery of one or different items to a single patient or to a group of patients in nearby locations. Security may be provided by providing locks on the drawers to allow access to certain users, such a nurses, or allow access to only certain items, or allow access only at certain times of the day.
In order to access items in a dispensing unit, an authorized user may be required to provide authenticating information. Such information may be provided in the form of a user ID/password, data read from a user card, or biometric data (such as by scanning a fingerprint), or some combination of these features.
For example, in the case of fingerprint authentication, a user may first be required to enroll his/her fingerprint. This may be done by the user when first using a dispensing unit, by scanning a fingerprint after entering a user ID and password that has been provided by the administrator of the system. Once the fingerprint is scanned, it is stored in the system as a reference fingerprint and the same user can access the system and dispensing unit in the future after scanning his/her fingerprint, if the scanned fingerprint matches the reference fingerprint.
Using a fingerprint to authenticate a user does present some issues. For example, a user may damage or injure the finger used for the reference fingerprint, and it may not be possible to subsequently get an useable scan of the fingerprint after it has been enrolled. Also, when enrolling it may be difficult for a user to determine which finger is best to use (a preferred finger of the user may provide a fingerprint that may have features that make it difficult to accurately scan or to distinguish from other fingerprints). Also, when a plurality of dispensing units are linked in a network, the scanner at one unit may digitize a scanned fingerprint using a different methodology than another unit scanning the same fingerprint, and thus the units may not be compatible with each other. In such a case, one dispensing unit (e.g., a newer unit using the latest scanning algorithms) may not recognize a fingerprint scanned during enrollment at a different dispensing unit (e.g., an older legacy unit).